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John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the lifers’ stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Irwin taught sociology at San Francisco State University for 27 years, during which time he studied prisons and jails. His research was published in five books. He was also a member of the Working Party for the American Friends Service Committee that wrote the influential report--The Struggle for Justice. He worked closely with the California legislature on the Uniform Sentencing Act passed in 1976.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This small, incisive book examines the population of lifers by means of a detailed chronology of the lives of a handful of prisoners. Irwin, an ex-con who wrote a book that became required reading at colleges all over the country in the 1970s (The Felon), takes full advantage of the credibility he has earned over several decades of research in prisons, and gains the confidence of his subjects. They talk about their backgrounds, the crimes that got them locked up (one of his subjects was conclusively shown to be innocent, and was released as the book was being written), and their several ways of adapting to life in prison. The prisoners are all complicated people, some more sympathetic than others, and their lives illuminate the social cost of lifetime incarceration. The death penalty understandably sucks most of the air out of the present-day discussions of crime and punishment, but when it is eliminated over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of people will remain behind bars, some locked up for more than half a century. Irwin's book is an intelligent and brave beginning of an overdue discussion.

I hated reading this book for class. As I'm writing this review I'm still mad. It was really a waste of my money to read stories that are identical to each inmate. Hopefully, your professor will not force you to purchase this dread awful book.